Everyone in aviation supports the concept of cross-countries in small airplanes. The reality is, however, that an amazingly large percentage of the pilot population feels uncomfortable taking a cross-country that's much longer than 500 miles. Three hundred miles may be the limit for some folks. This, as most experienced cross-country flyers will tell you, is an unnecessary fear. Flying from Cincinnati to Philadelphia - or from New York to Los Angeles, for that matter - should be no more difficult than that familiar short hop you periodically take to see Uncle Earl. The only difference is that the long haul takes you over some unfamiliar territory, lasts longer, and requires more time spent flight planning.
Regardless of how long it is, a long cross-country is nothing more than a bunch of short trips to see Uncle Earl, laid end to end. And, therein lies the secret.
Pilots who worry too much about long flights are looking at the entire flight. They are looking far down the road at their destination, rather than concentrating on that short section right there in front of them that's about as long as the trip to see Earl.
Forget about the entire trip. Just picture yourself flying short sections, and, when you've reached the end of one such section, start flying the next one. The only difference between the trip to Uncle Earl's and a long cross-country is that you don't land at the end of each short segment, and you spend more time monitoring the compass and your watch while checking them against the ground.
Wait! What was that last thing he said? The part about the compass and the ground? Someone out there is saying, "Wait a minute! This is the new millennium where GPSs can cost less than a good vertical card compass and are used for everything from tracking lost cars to delivering pizza."
OK, you caught me saying something entirely reactionary, old fashioned, and out of date. But is it? Let's analyze the long cross-country, the compass, the GPS, and the worried pilot.
The entire GPS phenomenon has ceased to be a phenomenon because it has become the standard by which all other means of navigation are judged. What can be easier than pushing the "to" button, centering the little airplane on the line, and trundling off over the horizon? We don't even have to have visibility good enough to see all our checkpoints, do we? We know where we are because the little green screen tells us. We don't even need to know our compass heading because the line tells us everything. There's no reason to figure out ETAs because it's right there on the screen. At least, all of that stuff is right there until the batteries fail or a meteor takes out the satellite or any one of a dozen other mechanical failures turn the screen into a blank, expensive piece of plastic.
The possibility of mechanical failure is one reason that the FAA still forces the student pilot to learn basic pilotage and dead reckoning. Originally the FAA did that because that's the way navigation has always been done and the FAA was slow to change. These days, however, this is one place where the FAA's anachronistic way of thinking helps the pilot by requiring fundamental training in what's actually needed to keep from getting lost - and that isn't the GPS. Don't get me wrong: The GPS absolutely is the way to navigate, but it should never be the only way to navigate.
The ready availability of the GPS has certainly taken a lot of the fear out of flying long distances for most people. At the same time, however, the GPS can easily cause the long-distance planner to take the trip a little too lightly because he or she places too much faith in electronics and not enough in good preparation.
One of the psychological drawbacks to owning a GPS is that just knowing it is lying there in the sock drawer waiting to guide you to places unknown can make you lazy in flight planning. Plus, it gives you a little too much confidence. After all, why spend all that time drawing lines on maps and figuring ETAs, ATAs, MCHs, and all that other dead-reckoning, pilotage stuff when it's all being done automatically for you? This is bad, if nothing else, because the old-fashioned style of flight planning offers real advantages to the nervous pilot besides just supplying navigation for the flight.
One immediate benefit of sitting at the kitchen table with a plotter and sectionals is that you gain a much better understanding of what's ahead. In the process of drawing lines, writing distances, and determining headings on your sectional, without even knowing it you're noticing the relationship between checkpoints and the topography over which you'll be flying. You see towns, power lines, rivers, and highways that will mean something to you when you see them through the windshield. In short, you're increasing your familiarity with the route, and, although it may not be as comfortable as trundling down to Uncle Earl's, at least you won't be a total stranger to the new territory.
If this is your first really long cross-country - and the definition of long is up to you - plan on breaking it up into manageable chunks that have nothing to do with fuel or distances. During your planning you'll visualize it as really short segments like the trip to Earl's. Plan landings at reasonable intervals; getting out of the plane for a few minutes and drinking a bottle of water or a soda is refreshing.
While you can grasp the concept of a cross-country being nothing more than a bunch of checkpoints strung together, it somehow seems significantly less formidable if you actually land every couple hours or so. Yes, this slows your overall trip considerably, but we're taking this trip to enjoy it. If we were serious about getting there, we'd already have the airline tickets in our pocket.
We ignored the GPS while we were doing flight planning, but are we going to ignore the GPS once we're airborne? Of course not. If you have a good tool, use it. We, however, are not going to place all of our navigational eggs into a single electronic basket. We're going to hedge our bets by combining the best of both worlds: We'll plug along with the GPS, but we're going to keep a thumb on the map and use our pilotage and dead-reckoning planning as backups.
One of the first backups we'll put in place will be to use the GPS to generate an accurate compass heading. If we were really diligent during our preflight planning, we worked our wind triangles and nailed down our wind correction angles just before takeoff, so we already have an accurate compass heading worked out. That heading, however, is based on winds-aloft forecasts that may or may not be accurate. In the pre-GPS days, we'd keep track of our progress across the ground and gradually fine-tune the compass heading until we had the proper heading figured out. We could do the same thing today, but in reality, that's what we do when flying with GPS correctly.
The GPS shows us the track that we're making across the ground and compares it to the track we want to be making. We pick a heading, then gradually crank the nose into the wind until the two tracks coincide. The smart pilot makes those corrections by referring to the compass or the directional gyro (you did set the DG to match the compass, didn't you?). By using the compass/DG we gradually arrive at a number that lets us truck right down the course line without paying attention to anything else. In this situation, the GPS is a substitute for looking out the window and changing our compass heading because we can see we aren't staying exactly on our course line. If we continually update our compass/DG heading based on what the GPS is showing us, we don't really care if the GPS dies because we'll have wired the compass heading required to hold the course.
By the way, don't forget to check the DG against the compass every so often, no more than at 15-minute intervals, to correct for DG precession.
One of the really neat aspects of the GPS is that it gives us constantly updated ETAs. But where are we going to set the GPS to give us ETAs to? Our final destination? No! That's too far out there, and that's going against our make-a-long-trip-into-a-bunch-of-little-trips concept. Let's set up the GPS with interim checkpoints and let it think our final destination is our first stop. If you're sitting there watching the ETA and distance readouts counting down and you know your short-term destination is less than a couple hours away, you don't feel as if you're on a long trip. The concept of a bunch of short trips back-to-back becomes real, and you quickly become comfortable with the entire situation. Once you've made a long trip in this fashion, you'll feel a lot better about hanging in there for three or four hours at a stretch while trying to make better time.
Now comes an important but seemingly innocuous action: When you get the DG/compass heading and ETA at your first stop stabilized on the GPS, write them down somewhere in big letters so you don't have to search for them. Then, if the GPS dies, you still have what you need to get where you're going. Besides, you have your thumb on the chart, and if your GPS goes south, you just follow the pencil line. It has worked for decades, and it'll work again now.
Another reason to plan your first big trip with two-hour legs is that you are likely to pick mini-destinations that are decent-size airports in easily located towns. If it's your first long trip and you're nervous about it, it's not a red-hot idea to plan a stopover in a remote strip in the boondocks for a couple of reasons. First, they are sometimes harder to find (some may not be in your GPS database), and second, they may not have fuel. If you're determined to visit the Yucca Resort and Salt Mine, either arrive with enough fuel to get you to the next fuel stop with plenty of margin, or call ahead to make sure they have fuel. Don't trust the airport guide. It's a real bummer to show up somewhere needing fuel only to find that there isn't any.
My own reason for stopping more often than we have to is totally unprofessional: We just happen to like looking around new airports. We do often pick out-of-the-way fields, but we always call ahead to make certain that they really do have gas.
When you're going across country in two-hour hops, what you're actually doing is an extended version of Sunday-afternoon airport-hopping. This kind of flying does something to you mentally that you hadn't planned on: The stops relax you and recharge your mental batteries. When you get out of the airplane, have a soda while poking through hangars and talk to the locals; there's no way you can't come away in better mental and physical condition than you were in when you landed. This is a benefit that shouldn't be underestimated.
There is something about sitting in an airplane for extended periods of time that is fatiguing, and dulls your mental edge. There are lots of theories about it, but certainly the noise, vibration, and constant vigilance make three hours in an airplane entirely different from the same three hours droning down the Interstate in a car. This, of course, makes no sense, since highway driving is much more dangerous, but maybe since we don't worry much about navigation while driving, it's not as mentally tiring.
So, if you're worried about that long cross-country, think about flying to see Uncle Earl. Now just picture several more of those short hops tied end-to-end with a landing every couple of hours to stretch your legs. Suddenly that long trip doesn't look that long any more, does it? So, break out the sectionals, find some interesting airports to stop at along the way, and get that long jaunt under way. You've been putting it off too long.
Budd Davisson is an aviation writer/photographer and magazine editor who has written approximately 2,200 articles and has flown more than 300 different types of aircraft. A CFI for 36 years, he teaches about 30 hours a month in his Pitts S-2A Special. Visit his Web site ( www.airbum.com ).
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